Well, it’s just another day of sitting on the couch, with my feet up and eating bonbons. What a life of leisure I must lead. Sometimes I get the feeling that this is how my husband sees me. And this was just such an occasion. “Did you even notice I did four loads of laundry, scrubbed the kitchen floor, wrote my next column, edited and published the newsletter, paid our bills, prepared dinner and polished all of the silver in the china closet?”
It happened last week. What had started out as a normal Thursday, nearly turned into a plan to stage an in-home protest and strike, combined with a growing urge to throttle my husband. Yes, my wonderful, cute, adorable hubby who, like most men, has no clue what women do or how they get it all done.
What the heck happened? It’s simple. He got upset because I hadn’t completed the task that he, in his wisdom, thought I should be working on first. The one he had added to the very top of my rather lengthy to-do list.
As he stood glowering over me, demanding an explanation, I found myself protesting: “You think I’ve been sitting around, doing nothing?” I shrieked. “Look at all the things I’ve done today and crossed off a list that never seems to end. Just how much more do you want me to do?”
I was feeling quite put out and unappreciated. Couldn’t he see I was doing my best to do it all? (Ok, that’s an admittedly stupid question on my part.)
“Well,” he insisted, growing a might testy at my growing dissent. “What I asked you to do was really important. I wouldn’t have put it on your list if it wasn’t. I promised the fellas that I would bring your famous homemade chocolate chip cookies to our golf group today and you didn’t get them done. I mean, this was really, really important. You know the guys love them and besides, now that my cold is finally better, I can actually get out and play a round.”
Aww, yes, your cold. You mean the cold that my homemade chicken soup helped cure? The soup that I made while sniffling and coughing from the very same affliction. Yup, that’s the one.
“But I don’t understand,” he continued, ignoring my objections. “I’ve seen you do two things at once. You do it all the time. Isn’t that, like, your superpower or something?”
Somewhere in my memory, music from a perfume commercial of years ago began playing. I began singing along in my head: "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan. And never let you forget you're a man. Because I'm a woman, W-O-M-A-N.”
Screech. Wait just a minute. The record in my head stopped spinning and the tune stopped. After which I proceeded to give the love of my life a not-so-subtle piece of my mind, setting him straight about what being a real-life “Wonder Woman” really entails. Then, with my new-found assertiveness, I hid all of the pencils in the house and removed my “to-do” lists from his view. I also stashed any additional pads of paper forestalling the possibility of further instructions.
They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. It must completely bypass the mind otherwise he would see and appreciate all the things that I do. Perhaps misplaced, I get where his priorities are. My chocolate chip cookies are worthy of being world-famous. On this day, he would have had a better chance by getting his golf buddies cookies at Safeway.
A bouquet of apology roses was delivered yesterday.
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